Quotes About Society

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture...have simply made us all members of one class.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?

Who is capable of self-support?" he demanded. "There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes

El paraguas individual es la imágen favorita de mi padre cuando quiere caracterizar el tiempo en que cada uno vivía sólo para sí y para su familia. Hay un cuadro del siglo XIX que representa una multitud bajo la lluvia, donde cada cual mantiene su paraguas por encima de su cabeza y la de su esposa, y obsequia a su vecino con las gotas que chorrean de aquél. Dice mi padre que ese cuadro debió ser para el artista una especie de sátira de aquellos tiempos.

As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society… We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has change. -Public Relations (1952)

Does not mean merely a physical aggregation of a number of persons…the crowd is rather a state of mind.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

Your law always does more harm than crime, and your morality is a form of violence.

I think drama has to push things to extremes so that we can understand what we are doing in our society.

This sect (the Encyclopaedists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning; success the rule of right and wrong, honesty as an affair of taste or decency: and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.))

Ron fut frappé par le contraste qui régnait entre les coulisses de la justice avec leurs cages à barreaux d'arrière-cour et la solennité très digne de la salle du tribunal. Le public voyait l'édifice, pas les communs.

Thus sometimes we watch individuals acting for their own ends with little thought of their effect on society at large.

There are people so intent on the separate life of individuals that they cannot grasp a notion of the action of the community as a whole – such an observer, incapable of a wide view of society, is aptly described in the saying that he "cannot see the forest for the trees… Thus sometimes we watch individuals acting for their own ends with little thought of their effect on society at large.

degeneration has been rather of a local than of a general character,

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.